7 December | 19.30 | Sala 1
Directed by: Alessandro Scippa
Starring: Lucia Valenzi, Marco Valenzi, Federico Geremicca, Antonio Scippa, Floriana Mazzuca, Aldo Di Nocera, Antonella Di Nocera, Renato Carpentieri
Year: 2022
Country: Italia
Running Time: 78’
Produced by: PARALLELO 41 PRODUZIONI, Luce Cinecittà, Fondazione Valenzi, Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico
Plot: 1975. Maurizio Valenzi becomes the first communist mayor of Naples, the largest city in southern Italy. Using interviews with the protagonists of the time and unpublished archive material, this is the story of a group of women and men who have tried to realize the dream of a politics closer to the people. A charismatic mayor and a team of high-profile aldermen planted the seeds of a new idea of city, a city that at the time was still marked by the wounds of war and a recent cholera epidemic. However, after the terrible 1980 earthquake, the economic interests of the reconstruction shifted and changed with the political and criminal balance, and Napoli’s fate would be marked by new forms of Camorra, which still today keeps on weighing on the city. That administrative experience, with its human specificity an with the civil values and ideals that characterized it, represented a unique historical moment, an event that can also make us wonder about how and why Italian communism, with strong social and cultural ties, could have been swept away along with the ghosts of real communism in the 20th century. With interviews with the protagonists of that dream-team and the children of those who are no longer here, the film is constructed as a prismatic story where the fragments of images, in the mirrors and refractions of today, nostalgically confront the past
